Grants Pass

The Caveman Over the Rogue

Since 1971 a seventeen-foot fiberglass caveman on an eight-foot pedestal has stood over Grants Pass, and the 1931 bridge over the Rogue River is called Caveman Bridge.¹ From 1922 the city was headquarters of the Oregon Caveman Club, whose members promoted tourism dressed in animal skins and horsehair wigs.¹ Grants Pass is the county seat of Josephine County, on the Rogue about thirty miles northwest of Medford.¹ In 1920 engineer John Hampshire gave the city a sign proclaiming “It’s the Climate!”, and that motto remains in place today.¹ The town’s economy now rests on high technology, medical care, tourism, retirement services, and wood products.¹

Ferries and a Stage Stop

The town stands on land once occupied by the River Takelma peoples, who were forcibly removed by war and treaty in 1853, after a disease epidemic.¹ The Fort Vannoy marker near Grants Pass says the Hudson’s Bay Company used a ford of the Rogue there as early as 1827, and that in 1850 a Mr. Long built the first permanent non-Indian dwelling in the Rogue Valley near it and started a ferry.⁴ James Vannoy and James Tuff bought the ferry in 1851; the marker dates Vannoy’s donation land claim to 1853, while the National Register nomination has James N. Vannoy filing it in 1852.^3,4 In October 1855 settlers converged at the ford behind hastily erected cover, which, the marker says, was never truly fortified but served as headquarters for the Oregon Volunteers during the 1855-1856 Indian Wars.⁴ In 1851 Joel Perkins also came to the Rogue and set up a ferry and general store, and a settlement called Perkinsville grew along the river.⁵ The 1940 Federal Writers’ Project guide says the town began as a stop on the California Stage route and was named by road builders working over the pass when a messenger told them of General Grant’s capture of Vicksburg.² The Oregon Encyclopedia tells it differently: settlers named a stagecoach stop on the Sacramento-to-Portland route Grant, for his 1863 victory at Vicksburg, and added “Pass” to tell it apart from Grant County.¹

Rails and Fires on G Street

The Oregon & California Railroad was completed to Medford in late 1883, and on December 7, 1883, a man named Bourne filed a plat for the “town of Grants Pass.”^1,3 In 1885 the boundary between Jackson and Josephine counties was redrawn to put a railhead in Josephine County, and Perkinsville and other settlements were abolished in favor of Grants Pass.^1,5 The National Register nomination says Grants Pass, until then part of Jackson County, became the county seat in 1885; the Oregon Encyclopedia says it was incorporated as the Josephine county seat in 1887, replacing Kerby.^1,3 In the 1880s the town built a railroad depot, a courthouse and jail, a Methodist church, a brewery, a dam for power and water, and, by the encyclopedia’s account, the first county bridge across the Rogue River.¹ Population went from 250 in 1880 to 1,432 in 1890 and 3,897 by 1910.¹ A marker Charles A. Wing put up in 1949 stands on the site of what it calls the first brick building in Grants Pass, built by John W. Howard in 1886.⁶ Before 1890 the buildings facing the depot were simple one- or two-story wood structures, and one account quoted in the nomination called the town “a fire trap of the most destructible style.”³ A series of fires beginning in 1894 burned the business district again and again, among them one that swept G Street in October 1899 and two major fires in 1902.³ Merchants slowly rebuilt in masonry, and the National Register nomination describes the G Street Historic District in the downtown core as an intact collection of late 19th century buildings.³

Gold Dust, Orchards, and Sugar Beets

Mining and agriculture dominated the town’s economy until about 1930, and the Grants Pass Irrigation District, formed in 1916, widened the crops to apples, pears, berries, alfalfa, cherries, grapes, hops, and melons.¹ In 1916 the Oregon Utah Sugar Company raised a large beet factory from over 700,000 bricks made by local brick maker C.E. Woolfolk, and it began operating on “Sugar Day,” October 24, 1916.⁷ Without enough land and water, the plant did not survive its second year and was moved to Toppenish, Washington; by the end of 1918 only broken bricks and its cement foundations remained, part of which still lies under the Fruitdale Grange parking lot.⁷ In 1911 Portland realtor H.L. Chapin set out to build a railroad from Grants Pass to Crescent City on the California coast, and residents laid ten miles of track to Wilderville in 1914, but war work after 1917 left the line unfinished.⁸ In 1940 the Federal Writers’ Project guide counted 4,666 people and found sawmills and wood-working plants numerous, with miners still coming in from the back country to sell their dust to local banks.² On Saturday nights, the guide said, ranchers, miners, and lumberjacks mingled with townsmen and tourists along the lighted streets.²

Depression, Timber, and the Courts

The Great Depression sent many locals into New Deal programs or small-scale mining, and public works projects built a new post office whose two New Deal murals remain inside.¹ The Rogue Theatre, designed by Robert Keeney, opened on November 9, 1938, closed on New Year’s Eve 1999 as the last of the original downtown movie houses, and reopened as a regional performing arts center.⁹ Timber overtook mining until federal policies cut the yield in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and the loss of timber funds and low property tax revenues brought public safety layoffs and, in 2007, a countywide library closure.¹ A challenge to the city’s camping ban reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2024, where in Johnson v. Grants Pass the court ruled 6-3 that the ordinance did not violate the Eighth Amendment, and in 2025 city councilors revoked funding to address homelessness.¹